Family of Red Mittens!
I’ve been working on red mittens since Saturday. Today I drafted a child version of the pattern!
Remember the one mitten?
In my knitting history, I’ve improvised many designs, but I’ve never attempted to write down the instructions in a way that anyone else could follow. My usual method involves a recipe card, and cryptic scrawling, a bit of a graph for patterns, a few numbers for size. This works well provided I finish mitten 2, or sock 2 soon after completing the first one. Otherwise it becomes an exercise in deconstructing the first mitten/sock, and hoping that in the end it really doesn’t matter if it’s an exact matched set, because, well that’s just proof that it’s hand made, and a guarantee that all of my results are unique!
and then there were two
Drafting up this red mitten pattern has challenged me to slow down, and be deliberate about how I am knitting. It’s easy enough to know how to do something, but the wording of it is a challenge that I’ve been working through these past few days.
An issue I’ve never really dealt with is sizing. My usual theory is to knit the garment, and find the person that it will fit. I’ve done enough knitting, that now I’m pretty good at guessing what needles go well with what yarn.
I’m not so keen on knitting swatches, so it’s been interesting!
I knit a mitten, and found out that it would fit a large hand. Then I altered the stitch count, and changed the needle size so it will make a mitten to fit a smaller hand. It is hard to imagine the math required to develop a child’s mitten, so after a little careful estimation, I cast on, and just went for it. These are the results! 
Cute eh?
Tags: art every day, knitting, knitting olympics, math, mittens, vancouver 2010
